Profile: ironore
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• • What are your Top 10 Musts for an MMO?
  • 1. No developer created quests, lore, cities, dungeons, PvP arenas, etc.  The devs should create the world.  The players interact with that world and each other in competitive or cooperative ways to create all that happens.
        
    2. A well balanced, natural economy built into the world, on top of which players have the tools to build their own infrastructure and economy that can fail or succeed at various times depending on the situation they create.
        
    3. No resources being spawned and dropped out of thin air.  If it is a natural component of the mob OR they picked it up or harvested it from the game world in real-time, then fine.
        
    4. No classes or levels, just an increase in a vast number of skills that apply to a vast number of situations. (see #1)  Also no showing of arbitrary numerical stats.
        
    5. Intuitive controls that let players build and manage resources from the individual scale to the world empire scale.
        
    6. Large varied, dynamic (deformable, climate, weather, etc), seamless (no instances) game world.
        
    7. No willy-nilly teleportation that makes the game world map distances meaningless.
        
    8. Less clutter and immersion-breaking user interfaces displays.
        
    9. Much more customization of character at the start, with many things that can be changed regularly.
        
    10. Multiple world types instead of just copies of the same map on a different server.  Some worlds have lots of magic and monsters of various types.  Other worlds have less or more or different types, different resources or varying amounts as well.

     

    I put this together quite quickly as I was in a hurry.  Maybe I will refine it later, but these are some of the things I have discussed quite frequently in other posts.  I agree that it has to be fun, but the challenge is to define that for as broad an audience as possible, or at least for your target audience.

  • Posted: 7/08/08 7:37 PM
    Developers Corner
• • ~*~ Testing a Design for a Dynamic, Player Driven World ~*~

  • Isn't that the way of it?  Disappointment and setbacks.  It turns out that the program could no longer perform the calculations after just 5 character files were created.  Not nearly enough to get some really dynamic interactions going.  I knew, and made clear, that there would be slow-downs and crashes, but I had anticipated things working for at least a little while.  I may try again on a faster machine, but it is unlikely to make much of a difference.  
    

    One thing I had hoped to do besides see the basics of dynamic player interaction begin to take root, was to balance some of the arbitrary variables, such as resource extraction, replenishment, decay, build rates, etc. 
    

    Perhaps I will do some of that while I work on moving things to a better platform.  Any suggestions? 
    I looked at zoho.com but it seems that most of their apps cost if they are to have full functionality.

  • Posted: 7/07/08 5:25 PM
    Developers Corner
• • I am so f#*#*#* tired of quests.

  • You know, I would take it one step further myself.  I can't stand the quests/tasks/missions of MMOs today, nor can I hardly force myself to crawl the instanced dungeons, do the meaningless crafting, explore the empty and disjointed worlds, grind up the levels, camp spawns for resources, or even participate in the less than compelling PvP arenas and contrived so-called end-game content, which takes way too long to get to for the improportionate amount of enjoyment to be had.

    I believe that so long as players and developers think that pre-programmed content is to be the focus of a persistent online world, we will never get anywhere in the evolution of the genre.

    What we need to focus on for once is the world itself.  Make the world vast, varied, complex, intuitive, detailed, dynamic, interactive, and mysterious for once.  Give the players many ways to interact with the world and each other and then let that interaction drive the on-going content.  Then we might be on to something for once.

  • Posted: 7/06/08 2:05 PM
    Developers Corner
• • Have Developers gotten lazy?

  • I might add to the above that although it is true that the majority of the current MMO market is satisfied with WoW and its ilk, you must remember that there is a very large segment of the gaming and even non-gaming population that see no point whatsoever to such a money-sinking grind-fest for hours on end with relatively little of the 'fun' or even 'accomplishment' factor to show for it.

    If just a little research and testing were put toward more dynamic game designs even in very low tech models, I think it would go a long way to figuring out how a completely new MMO could not only do well in the current market, but expand it greatly to include huge numbers of people that would find a truly compelling form of escapist entertainment that could rival contemporary television and cinema. 

    And I'm not talking about 100 years in the future either.  The ingredients are all there, it will just take some experimentation to get them mixed together properly.  The key is to get the ball rolling with those that have the desire for such a design or at least have very open minds.  Alternately you want to focus on those that have never really played an MMO and have no preconceived ideas of the way things 'should' work.

    So in short, yes someone with the real power in game development HAS gotten lazy.  Not because they want to take the safe road and be sure that it pans out, that is fine by me, and quite smart.  However, with even the tiniest portion of revenue and their already existing server structures, could not a small portion of their resources be devoted to some testing in order to have something ready for the future when the stagnant cookie-cutter market crashes?

    This is the sort of thing I am very interested in and continue to work towards.

  • Posted: 7/06/08 1:57 PM
    Developers Corner
• • How to stop farming and gold selling?

  • It sounds like you have got a pretty good system going there.  You have hit right on the most important factor, and that is deciding how much should come from the nodes. 

    As to other things being mentioned, for sure, gold, as everything should have some weight.

    I don't agree with selling gold.  I like the idea of a fantasy world where what you do THERE matters, not how much money you have in RL and can use to your advantage and the detriment of others.  If you can gain such an advantage in game, then fine, but just dumping it in at once, no good.

    And one last picky thing, tho I see it as a common mistake in many games.  Don't have any bronze nodes for mining.  Bronze is not a natural mineral, but rather an alloy of tin and copper.  1:10 ratio roughly.

  • Posted: 7/02/08 1:45 AM
    Developers Corner